Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilisation may be carried triumphantly forward. -Churchill

Fact of the day: 1st July

The Russian State Library is the national library of Russia, located in Moscow. It is the largest in the country and the fourth largest in the world for its collection of books (17.5 million).

It was named the V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR from 1925 until it was renamed in 1992 as the Russian State Library.

The library has over 275 km of shelves with more than 43 million items, including over 17 million books and serial volumes, 13 million journals, 350 thousand music scores and sound records, 150,000 maps and others.

There are items in 247 languages of the world, the foreign part representing about 29 percent of the entire collection.

Between 1922 and 1991 at least one copy of every book published in the USSR was deposited with the library, a practice which continues in a similar method today, with the library designated by law as a place to hold a “mandatory” copy of every publication issued in Russia.